Strange technology tales from the road

As my Technology Plumbing readers know, I travel a lot for business, but this week I am traveling for pleasure and visiting family in Florida. While I will talk more about the reason for my trip in a later post, wanted to use this post to talk about some strange technology tales that I have observed this week.

• I flew into the West Palm Beach (PBI) airport, which I have not previously done, and was shocked to be asked to sign the credit card receipt for my $3 charge. Now I know I could have paid cash for this transaction, but one of the allures of credit cards is their convenience. But having the attendant hand me the receipt by itself and ask me to sign it on my lap is just so last decade. O'Hare and most airports I have visited have the swipe and go process down, so time to get it together PBI.
• I booked my flights on United, which got me as far as Washington DC's Reagan airport, before handing me off to US Air for the flight to Florida. When I checked in for the United flight, via the Internet, I received boarding passes for both flights in United's format. This of course worked fine for the United flight, but the US Air gate attendant insisted on taking my entire boarding since there was nothing to tear off (United scans and returns their boarding passes). This left me with no boarding pass as I walked down the jetway. Luckily I recalled my seat assignment and was able to board without incident, but if there had been an issue with seating assignments I would have been in a strange position. If United and US Air can't figure out how to share boarding passes formats, how can we trust them to share much else?
  
• I am Sprint customer for my family's various cell phones and while visiting Florida thought it would make sense to move my family in Florida to Sprint as part of my existing family plan. Since I don't use all of my plan's minutes, and my Florida family doesn't use many minutes each month it seemed like the perfect match. Now here is the problem, Sprint limits the number of phone lines for a single package to 5. I understand they wouldn't want this to be unlimited, but in this case they have passed up the incremental revenue from the 2 new lines and the sale of 2 new phones, not to mention making this long time Sprint customer less then happy. In a competitive situation isn't it better to take some incremental revenue and keeping a long time customer happy then to get nothing and give the customer another reason to look around?

Well hopefully, my trip home won't involve anymore strange technology tales, but while I am traveling home, I will let my readers and these companies ponder these tales and hopefully learn from them.